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There have been some questions over the upcoming Steam Early Access launch (31 May 2013) and how this is going to affect development and people buying the game. Here is the key information: STEAM KEYS FOR EXISTING USERS: If you have ever pre-ordered Xenonauts at any point prior to the Steam launch, you are entitled to a Steam key for your copy of the game. This key will be sent (even if you have never activated the Desura key) within a few days of the Steam release If you activated your Desura key, you can claim your Xenonauts Steam key immediately via this method. If you did not activate your Desura key for whatever reason, we have your email address on record and will be emailing you a key direct in the next few days. We're just trying to work out the best way to do this. If you have pre-ordered the game and have still not received a Steam key by the 3rd June 2013, email me at chris@xenonauts.com with proof of purchase and I'll get you sent a key. Please check your spam filter and old email addresses first though! [*]Mac and Linux versions will be arriving on Steam shortly, we've just gotta go through the porting process first. PREMIUM / STANDARD PRE-ORDERS: With the Steam launch, we are discontinuing the Premium Pre-Orders. All copies of the game will now be sold at $19.99 until official release, when the price will climb to $24.99. If you are an existing Premium Pre-Orderer, we are working on something to say thankyou for the extra $10 donation, but it's currently a secret. Forum medals will be discontinued tomorrow: This is because they are integrated with Desura, who will likely only make up a small section of our sales from now on. Those with forum medals already will not lose them, but the graphics are likely to be shrunk a little bit and the wording will be changed to read "Founder" (or something to that effect) rather than pre-orderer. If you have not already claimed a forum model, post in this thread in the next 24 hours and I'll give you on manually. FUTURE SALES: We will be doing direct sales on our website through the Humble Store in future, as we'll get a much larger cut of revenue from them than our current arrangement with Desura. You will still be able to buy our game on the Desura site if you so wish. Both Desura and the Humble Store will continue to be updated as development continues, but only with the Stable releases (explained in more detail below). All future purchases of the game from either our website's Humble Store or Desura should also come with a Steam key. The Humble Store is DRM-free, and the DRM-free option will remain on Desura too. So that's a summary of exactly how things will change as of the Steam release, but there will also be changes moving forwards with development. Good ones. STABLE VS. EXPERIMENTAL BUILDS: I have created a new build today called V18 STABLE. This is the same as V18.51 Hotfix 3 and marks the point where we have implemented all the features we wanted to implement in the V18 series of releases, and also fixed all the major stability issues. It is the "finished" version of the V18 builds. V18 Stable will be the default release build on Steam and will be the build you receive if you buy a copy on the Humble Store. It will also be uploaded to Desura, and we are about to send it off to the porter to port the build to Mac / Linux. The next build that we upload to any of these places, or port to Mac / Linux, will be V19 Stable. So the vast majority of users won't see any updates for a couple of months but then will get another stable, polished release appear with a bunch of new features. However, Steam allows users to opt-in to different branches for a game that they own. We will allow users to opt-in to our Experimental branch, which will contain the newer releases that have more features but will be less stable. We can upload, patch and mess around with builds on that branch without ever affecting the stable branch. This is where we will go through the numerous iterations to reach V19 Stable. This will be the best of both worlds - people who just want to play the game don't have to put up with crashes, and those who want to help us test can access the new features as soon as we release them. The only disadvantage is that you will need to be on Steam to get access to the experimental builds...but there's no way around that, I'm afraid... V19 PREVIEW: This is the key stuff we want in V19 Stable: - New UI for the Geoscape and base screens - Air Combat Autoresolve - Finished final mission Only three features, but between them they'll transform the game. No doubt we'll fix a lot of small things too, and we'll be working on the balance the entire time too, but those are the headline features we will be working towards.

Hi folks, I recently returned to check up on the progress of Xenonauts and was hoping to hop into game. I noticed that the game is now on steam and I was wondering if it was possible to get access to this as I backed the game in its early stages using Desura. Sorry if this has been covered but there is so much info Im not sure where to begin. Peace.

Good news - the chaps over at Steam seem happy to have us launch on Steam Early Access in four of five weeks' time. Steam has always been the end goal for us and I know a lot of people have been waiting for us to go on Steam before they play the game, so I think this is definitely a good thing. We will be distributing a Steam key to everyone that owns a copy of the game, with this distribution coming via Desura. I assume you'll be sent an email containing a code, but I'll check and let you know closer to the date. Steam should be an improvement in the following ways: 1) It's just generally more robust and should support better download speeds. 2) We don't need to have our files approved by Steam; we just press a button and they go live. Will increase the turnaround speed for updates, especially very minor ones. 3) We can have multiple branches of the code. We'll probably move to having a "stable" branch and an "experimental" branch, the benefits of which should be obvious to all. Desura will continue to be updated with new files as development continues, although I would imagine Steam will become our primary focus. I'm also looking into using the Humble Store for our direct sales on our website, which will also include a Steam key on purchase but gives us a higher revenue share and perhaps will make it more likely we'll end up in a Humble Bundle in due course. One thing to note here - we will be discontinuing the current Premium / Standard pre-order split. All sales will be made at the $19.99 price point, which will rise to $24.99 on release. Nobody who buy the game after the changeover will get a forum badge, because I don't want to go through the forum integration process again....so if you have one, treasure it. (Incidentally, if people don't think they've got value from their extra $10 then I'm open to discussion on what we can do to improve things. A number of the previously Premium-only items such as the novella are included in the Launcher for general consumption, and I plan to do the same for development diary. This is so people know where to find them without trawling our forums, and also as it seems a waste to limit the readership of them...but that does somewhat erode the value of the Premium Pre-Order, although we never really promised much along with it.) Anyway, what we need to be able to launch on Steam is stable build of the game - one that doesn't have 150,000 files in it. You guys can help with the former, as V18 will become this Steam stable build. It's a bit like prior to the Kickstarter when we spent a lot of time polishing up that build before we released the demo, and we'll probably release a second demo when we launch on Steam too. So it's going to be a busy month, but being on Steam should make it worthwhile. Hopefully!

We've now heard back from Steam and we've pencilled in a release date for Early Access of the 31st May, which is eight days from now. This may slip back due to unforseen circumstances, but one would hope not. I've submitted all the marketing materials and I just need to wait and see what I need to do to start uploading builds and the like. I am still not 100% certain when Steam keys will go out for existing users, but hopefully that will happen prior to release. At the very least I want to give a few people Steam keys so they can test the download and update process on Steam to see if there's any nasty incompatibility surprises in wait for us. I'll post updates here once I know more about this. Build V18.51 will form the basis of the Steam stable release, with a few updates that we will test out via hotfix or on Steam itself if we get on there in advance. The likely additions will be: - Bugfixes - Xenopedia descriptions will be completed (but subject to future tweaks) - More maps (I'll look at the community ones as my first port of call) - Balance patch (Aaron has got a balance patch to smooth the combat progression we'll probably put in) This post is mostly to let everyone know the release date. It's gonna be a busy week!

So now Steam allows the sale of "early access" games, ie games that are still a work in progress: http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Early%20Access/ How about putting Xenonauts up there, Chris? You already have a deal with Steam if I remember correctly, so you could distribute updates to the game through the robust Steam system and give out Steam keys early to those who preordered. I say give it a look, it's bound to be a lot better than Desura. It would also be a great way of getting some more sales.